Ada was ahead of her time. In in the early 1800s, Ada worked with Charles Babbage on his mechanical mathematical machines, what we now call computers.  She is known as the first programmer, but perhaps her most important contribution was her imagination. Charles saw his machine as being for calculations, but Ada wrote that they would be used for far more, suggesting they would be used for music. This might seem obvious now, but back in the early Victorian ear, before the electrical light bulb had even been invented her ideas were revolutionary.

Read more about Ada on the  cs4fn website.

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CLASSROOM IDEAS

Music, History & English.  Create a program incorporating music. Find out about the 1800’s and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Write and perform a play about what it would have been like to live then and what people would have thought about their work and ideas.

This work was supported by the Institute of Coding, which is supported by the Office for Students (OfS).

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